Venue: Nam June Paik Art Center 2F, Seminar room (Seoul)

08, 15, 22, 29 July 2017(4 times)

Hosted and Organized by Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation

The International Symposium ‘Gift of Nam June Paik 9’ will be held at Nam June Paik Art Center from 8th July to 29th July, every Saturdays under the title Coevolution: Cybernetics to Posthuman. Nam June Paik defined ‘Cybernetics’ as various relationships between humans and machines, art and machines, art and technologies, humans and art and even among diverse arts(artists). He understood that it would generate varying combinations out of these relationships. Nam June Paik put his ideas about cybernetics into artistic practices: he performed Robot Opera with Robot K-456 he himself had made and manipulated, expressing simply and playfully the complicated relationship between humans and machines.

‘Cybernetics’ as a discipline was first introduced by Norbert Wiener, as he attempted to explain the regulative relationship between humans and machines. When a number of scholars gathered and discussed on the theme at Macy Conferences, however, Cybernetics dynamically developed into an emerging epistemological concept. Nam June Paik’s theoretical ideas and artistic practices correspond to (or lead ahead) the few steps of the radical development of Cybernetics achieved throughout the history: the first wave Cybernetics, which was at the level of mechanic feedback, and the second wave Cybernetics, which characterizes as reflexity and self-generation and the third wave Cybernetics, at the center of which is emergence, are all relevant. These steps express a posthuman evolutional point of view on how the boundary between humans and machines is deconstructed.

Our symposium looks into a contemporary approach to the phased developmental history of ‘Cybernetics’ and at the same time analyzes Nam June Paik’s works on machines and art. Firstly, We will explore interesting topics on human and control of machine by addressing ‘sudden unintended acceleration as a psychosis,’ while looking over the war-related backgrounds of the birth of cybernetics and how the discipline has been settled as a general paradigm through the Cold War. We will also discuss cybernetics capitalism and the new class disintegration, and the network environment and proletariat solidarity strategies against it. After that, we will suggest epistemological frameworks with which to interpret Nam June Paik’s lesser known video works including The Rain in My Heart, continuing the conversations with contemporary artists. Lastly, there will be a discussion on Nam June Paik’s robots from the posthuman point of view, focusing on ‘externalization of perception’ and ‘the ensemble of humans and machines.’

We structured our symposium so that two or three presenters, who share similar interests, can have in-depth discussion on their themes, forgoing a round table session at which all the presenters gather on the same day. Therefore, the symposium may look like a series of lectures. We expect this Symposium will develop into a dynamic and contemporary discursive space where presenters from diverse background freely discuss in small spaces. We hope that each participant exists as a subjective observer and there will be sensitive and exciting reactions within that space.

+https://njpac-en.ggcf.kr/archives/education/international-symposium-gift-of-nam-june-paik-9-%E3%80%8Acoevolution-cybernetics-to-posthuman%E3%80%8B?term=9